Page 401 - The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

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390 ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
of eighteen I was a daily drinker, and by age twenty-
one I had my first year-long binge in France, which I
euphemistically referred to as my study year abroad. I
came home very sick and drunk. A few months later I
went to bed with a bottle of Scotch one night and de-
cided I would go to law school. If you are having trou-
ble, try something that is even more difficult, to “show
them.” That was my philosophy. It was enough to
drive me to drink, and it did.
At law school we used to drink a lot of beer in student
pubs, debating whether rocks had souls and what was
the nature of the judicial process, as though it had never
been considered before. As new lawyers, my husband
and I eagerly beavered in the office early in the morning
before running off to court to fearlessly defend the
downtrodden. Lunch was the training ground for the
perpetual quest for the best martini—usually two or
three of them, good for taking away the knot that by this
time had permanently lodged itself in my stomach. (I
didn’t know that it represented fear and that I was not a
fearless defender after all.) Afternoons would be full
of creative legal arguments in court. If court finished
early, maybe we’d make it back to the office, maybe
not.
Evenings we drank with the best of them: lawyers,
writers, media types, everyone vying to tell the best
stories, which of course got funnier and funnier the
more we drank and the later it got. When I drank, the
fear evaporated and I became articulate and appar-
ently very, very funny—or so they said then. Years
later I drank so much that I was no longer funny. But
at the time, the drinks and the stories and the cama-
raderie were as wonderful as I was witty. We would